E3 2014: Being Bad in Skylanders Trap Team

Activision’s dominance of the kids’ toy and video game world is about to get a lot more secure. Due out October 5 (October 10 in the UK), Skylanders Trap Team marks the return of Toys for Bob to the helm of the massively popular franchise.

You can read all about the backstory and setting in our previous preview. Just in case, you need a quick refresher, Kaos has sprung some of Skyland’s notorious Cloudcracker Prison. Instead of helping Kaos with the rest of his evil plan, the villains spread out through Skylands and start causing their own trouble. The Skylanders, in coordination with the new Trap Master Skylanders, now have to hunt down the villains and capture them.

The villains all share the same sort of consistent insanity found in the roster of Skylanders. There’s a magic villain named Painyatta, who is a giant, colorful piñata that barfs candy on his enemies and smashes them with a giant lollipop. Air villain Buzzer Beak is a tiny bird wearing a propeller beanie that has blades that extend and slice at his enemies.

While the series has always had plenty of inventive villains, Trap Team goes a step further by letting players capture and then use the villains in combat. Now, when you defeat Shrednaught, a Tech villain that’s essentially a walking chainsaw, you can capture the villain using a special shard you insert into the new portal. The capture animation is unique for each villain, akin to the magic moment when you swap in a Skylander. The portal itself has a small speaker in it, so you can actually hear the villain’s complaints coming from inside the portal.

Once you’ve got him trapped, you can sub him in for whichever Skylander you’re already playing. You then have access to all the villain’s powers. A timer limits the villain’s time on the field, and you’ll have to let the timer recharge before bringing them back in again. Swapping back and forth is actually a tactical advantage for some villains. The Nature villain Broccoli Guy is a healer, so you can swap him in and have him drop a healing glyph on the field, before swapping back out to a more aggressive Skyalnder.

To make the experience that much more personal, each villain has his or her own theme. Broccoli Guy, for instance, has a funky sort of 70s theme song. The Undead villain Wolfgang, on the other hand, is more a hard rocking theme to fit with the rest of his personality. Players can also use Wolfgang’s bone harp to sent out damaging music notes, or do an 80s-style guitar god knee slide into his opponents

You need to match each villain with a shard of the appropriate element, and you can only store one villain per element. While you will have to buy multiple shards to get all the game’s villains, you will be able to swap out for any villains you’ve defeated at a Villain Vault located in the game’s hub level.

The Academy introduces my second favorite feature of the game – the return of Skystones, the card game from Giants. This version is called Skystones Smash. The two players face off across three rows. Each player has three cards, each of which has an attack and a defense value. The players take turns placing cards in one of the three rows. After each placement, the cards attempt to attack. If they’re blocked, the attack and defense values are compared and defeated cards are removed. If a card isn’t blocked, it does its attack damage to the opposing player.

We weren’t able to play through any of the hub, but we do know that it opens up throughout the course of the campaign and will reward exploration. We did see that Persephone is back for upgrades and had a chance to experience a fun side-scrolling level (complete with an 8-bit version of the Academy theme), that reminded us a lot of the content in Swap Force’s Woodburrow.

In addition to the new villains and hub options, we also learned about several of the new Trap Masters. The coolest is Krypt King, an Undead Trap Master who looks like an Arkeyan mummy and comes armed with a massive Traptanium sword. There’s also a walking Tech Trap Master called Jail Breaker. He’s basically a walking robot armed with massive Traptanium fists.

The team isn’t saying how many Trap Masters will be available in the game; we’ve seen versions of all but three of the elements, and we know that there’s a second Tech Trap Master named Gearshift, so odds are, we’ll be seeing 16 total Trap Masters in the full roster. We didn’t see nearly as many core Skylanders for Trap Team, but we do know that there’s a new Fire Skylander named Torch, a sort-of blacksmith armed with a bellows and a hammer.

We had the chance to see most of these options play out in a playthrough of the Secret Sewers of Supreme Stink. This level comes about halfway through the main campaign. Several of the villains have holed up in the sewers and are no harvesting some kind of goo. The Skylanders have to confront the bad guys and rescue Gillmen who work in the sewers.

While combat is obviously a big part of the game, there’s loads of exploration and puzzles here as well. There are spigots to turn off goo waterfalls, bombs to smash through doors, and entirely new lock puzzles. While Swap Force’s energy puzzles where much more co-op friendly, the lock puzzles in Trap Team are more like those of the previous games. Now through, instead of tilting the mechanism to land a goblin in a hole, you’ll be using a jetpack to careen around obstacles and position your goblin in the place he needs to be to unlock the door.

It’s good to see Toys for Bob back in charge of Skylanders and we’ll be checking in with the team regularly to bring you more details between now and the game’s release later this year.

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